


Psychopomp and Circumstance

by Sub_Rosa



Category: Bleach, Multi-Fandom, Religion & Lore - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Comedy, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Dubious Mythology, Gen, Mythology References, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 14:59:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15294009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sub_Rosa/pseuds/Sub_Rosa
Summary: Fresh from the final battles with Aizen and the Espada, Shunsui is forced to grapple with an even more terrifying enemy:International politics.





	Psychopomp and Circumstance

The missive came less than a month after Aizen was sealed away.

Shunsui had been sitting with Juushiro in the hospital when the messenger came, emerging from a maw of twisted space only to crash through the window, scattering broken glass across the floor. Now, one of the nurses was sweeping the glass up, and Juushiro was playing _nice_ with the messenger, like it was his new best friend.

“Don’t you dare open it,” Shunsui said. “It will probably bite you, and then you’ll get spirit rabies.”

“I can’t _not_ open it!” Juushiro said helplessly. “It’s so cute!”

“The last time we got one of these it shat black all over Captain Yamamoto’s robes. There’s a reason we use Hell Butterflies.”

“Caw,” said the doe-eyed crow sitting at Juushiro’s bedside, expectantly waiting for someone to use it as intended.

“I’m going to open the crow,” Juushiro said.

“Don’t do it-!”

Juushiro opened the crow, reaching out to take it in his hands and break it open. The simulacrum’s head tore away bloodlessly, spilling graphite across the bedsheets and revealing a rolled-up note.

The nurse groaned helplessly and went to get the vacuum cleaner.

“Great, you opened it.” Shunsui sighed. “I bet you do your paperwork on time, too.”

“Hush,” Juushiro said. He was a wreck in recovery, but he still completely silenced Shunsui. “I know you’re as much of a responsible adult as I am… hm. Oh. I think the message for you.”

“What? That can’t be right.” 

Juushiro wordlessly passed the note over, black ink pounded into waxy white paper by typewriter keys.

_You are invited to attend the International Conference on Interventions in Hueco Mundo. Your attendance would be deeply appreciated._

“Euuugh,” Shunsui said, following the exclamation up with a noise like a dying crab. “I always hate these things. You know they have proper _diplomats_ to argue with each other in the world of the living, Juushiro?”

“In the world of the living, people can’t hassle each other around with spiritual pressure.”

“They might as well be,” Shunsui grumbled. “You think this is for me?”

“You’re the one Captain Yamamoto always takes with him, aren’t you?” Juushiro asked rhetorically. “You’re acting Captain-Commander until he wakes up again, to boot, although he’ll probably be up and about any day now.”

“I _still_ think the message is for you,” Shunsui said. “But you’re still healing, so I guess I’ll just have to go in your place, anyways.”

Juushiro nodded, as if that made any sense whatsoever. “The note doesn’t say when the conference is." 

“No, it’s implied, you see? The implication is that they want you as soon as possible.” Shunsui stood up and began stretching out. “Just like ‘your attendance would be deeply appreciated’ implies that they want to find a way to make your attendance mandatory.

“Are you going to go to an international political conference in _that?”_ Juushiro asked, raising an eyebrow at Shunsui’s clothes.

“I could swap to a different pattern if it’s really so horrendous,” Shunsui said. The pattern really was awful. “But the color is non-negotiable.”

===

The first time he had ever attended one of these meetings, less than a century before, Yamamoto had been by his side, and the room had been in chaos.

“Thank you for convening here today,” a delegate had spoken, and all Shunsui remembered of him now was how utterly exhausted he had seemed at the time. Now, of course, Shunsui knew that every politician was exhausted. “I’m sure many of you have sensed the events that took place in America twenty-four hours ago, or otherwise been made aware of them, but for the uninformed, let me be clear:

“Project Manhattan was a success.”

That wasn’t news, but someone in the front row still chittered with irreverent displeasure, anyways. “Why is it always America?”

“Quiet!” the delegate had roared, and the room willingly went silent, without whining about breach of conduct. “The atomic bomb works. _I was there,_  and I don’t think you understand the _gravity_ of the situation. The living have tamed a power on par with some of our greatest pillars of the afterlife, and they have put it in a bottle to kill each other with!”

Several eyes flickered to Yamamoto, expecting him to be offended by the comparison to a mere mortal machine, but he didn’t even blink.

“ _Higher Hollows_ have made incursions into the world of the living, and done less damage. I hope I don’t need to explain why Elysium finds this state of affairs utterly unacceptable. I hope I don’t need to explain why this is an incalculable risk to us — to _all_ of us. We _must_ take action.”

Other people disagreed with him, naturally.

“Need I remind this esteemed assembly of our purpose?” Ezra asked, having taken the podium. His plain clothes seemed transmuted into the garb of a king by his very radiance, burning brilliantly as if to prove that atomic fire could never outstrip him. Him! It was not the first ostentatious show of power, and it would not be the last. “Need I remind us of our very nature? We are the afterlife. We are the otherworld. For all of our differences, this is what unites us: that we do not touch the living world, save to keep it clean of our own kind.

“This is our compact. We are what comes after mortal life, not another part of the mortal world. If we intervene in mortal affairs, we will not be life after death — we will just be another kind of living.”

Many figures nodded around the room, yes-men and yes-women; but a few stood up, waiting to be called upon. Finally, a blonde woman in armor was able to take the spotlight, and she spoke:

“With all due respect, Ezra, you betray your own contempt for the living. Do you find it so awful an idea to be a part of their world?”

Silence filled the room for the second time. Ezra raised an eyebrow, beckoning for her to continue.

“We became who we are for a reason. Now we find ourselves faced with new reasons for action; it is not wrong for us to choose ourselves once again.”

“Who are you, exactly?” Ezra asked.

 _Prick_ , Shunsui thought. _Don’t act like you don’t know just for a power play-_

Yamamoto whumped him on the back of the head, and he realized he had been speaking out loud again.

“King Arthur Pendragon of Albion, sir.”

“Of course,” Ezra said with a laugh. “Forgive me — you see, I couldn’t tell if I couldn’t recognize you because you’ve looked different recently, or if I couldn’t recognize you because you’re just new blood.”

Silence for a third time. Arthur’s brow furrowed.

“I can’t speak for all of us, here, but I can speak for me and mine,” Ezra said. “The afterlife is the only place that matters. The afterlife is the only place where people can _really_ _flourish_. The world of the living is the crucible we use to populate Heaven with random new souls; preserving the full variety of mankind requires a certain… non-interventionist stance.”

Arthur muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “you lazy, disingenuous cur!”, her voice dripping with disdain.

Far, far down Shunsui’s table, at the other end, a man with close-shaved brown hair snorted. “You call it ‘flourishing’, huh?”

And now, finally, Yamamoto spoke. “Sariputta, I think we’re all familiar with your thoughts on our western counterparts.”

“I’m not wrong,” Sariputta said, biting the bullet harder than a vise.

 _Oh, I want to hear this_ , Shunsui thought, but didn’t say, because he didn’t want to lose the Seireitei twenty years of political capital in one go.

“See, the kid is curious,” Sariputta said, and Shunsui resolved to find a way to block mind readers _as soon as this fucking meeting was over, holy shit-_ “Relax, kid, it’s just cold reading.” _DAMN IT._

Yamamoto sighed, and put his head in his hands.

“I suppose you would rather we flushed our souls down the drain, wouldn’t you?” another man spoke, mocking Sariputta. The delegate from Valhalla, Helgi was incredibly well-built and toned by hours of swimming upstream through the Earth’s molten core; he looked as if he was about to burst out of his own clothes every time he locked eyes with another man, flexing to display his dominance.

If you asked him, it was a power move, _not_ a come-on.

“Of course not,” Sariputta said. “You’re supposed to _teach them-_ ”

“Hell yeah you should flush your souls down the drain,” Lord Hao said, slamming his fist on the table. The sole attendee from the Celestial Bureaucracy, Hao was a dark-haired and ageless figure with skin of flawless jade. Although he was far from the only person to attend this conference alone, his solitary status was probably less a show of power, and more a sign that no-one wanted to come with him, regardless. “Wipe those suckers clean and send them back ‘round the wheel. It’s only healthy, you know; it builds character. Makes em resilient.”

“Come on,” Helgi said. “Didn’t we just establish that we’re supposed to be the after- _life?_ If you think anyone _really_ lives through reincarnation, you might as well say your corpse ‘lived’ through your death, because all of the materia is technically still around.”

Lord Hao grimaced, opened his mouth-

“An interesting argument,” Sariputta said. “But, hm. Would it interest you to know that the memories of a caterpillar can persist even through its metamorphosis into a butterfly?”

“DON’T YOU DARE ARGUE _FOR_ ME, SPINELESS JUNIOR TRASH!” Lord Hao roared. He stood up, and his spiritual pressure exploded outwards like a volcanic eruption; killing intent sharp enough to sever a man’s spiritual power and then follow-up with a rather bloody and violent castration. “I DON’T NEED YOUR HELP TO SQUABBLE WITH WESTERN MONGRELS!”

Sariputta yawned, and Helgi rolled his eyes.

“If we can get back on topic-” said the delegate from Elysium. “-instead of arguing ontology as usual?”

“What is there to say?” Arthur asked. “For the first time, it may be possible for mortals to literally drive themselves extinct. We can’t sit around in our ivory towers-”

“Hypocrite,” Ezra coughed.

“- _even if we don’t care_. If everyone in the living world is _bombed to death_ , that’s a bit of a logistical issue for you, isn’t it?”

“We’d make do,” Ezra protested stiffly.

And Yamamoto spoke: “What can actually be done about this matter? Self-deception and self-aggrandizing do not become us.”

“We can replace memories and falsify evidence, obviously,” said the Elysian. “The news of a successful nuclear detonation hasn’t reached the wider population; combing over the mortal state apparatus would be inconvenient but well within our collective capacity.”

Yamamoto waved a hand. “You can bail water out from a sinking ship, but you can’t plug these leaks. Nuclear explosives naturally follow from nuclear physics and mortal chemistry; the living would just figure it all out again.”

“So erase nuclear physics,” the Elysian said.

“Just how much manpower do you think we all have?” Yamamoto asked. “How much manpower can _you_ put forward, Arete? Constantly wasting man-hours to subvert nuclear physicists is unacceptable. Regressing the world of the living to pre-modern knowledge of physics and chemistry would be next to impossible, and would only kick the problem backwards — constantly wasting man-hours to prevent the living from rediscovering physics and chemistry would be unacceptable.”

They all bickered and muttered at each other (perpetually drifting to topics that had nothing to do with Trinity), but in the end, that was the heart of the matter.

“You come up with all of that on the spot, Captain?” Shunsui asked, when they left the conference, stepping between spaces to return to the Seireitei.

Yamamoto smiled thinly, although Shunsui would never have told anyone that Yamamoto had _smiled_. Who would believe him? “I follow mortal developments in explosives quite closely.”

“Ahh, surely you’re not worried about being overshadowed?”

“I appreciate a friendly competition.”

Less than a month later, atomic bombs rained down on Japan, and over one hundred thousand people died.

Yamamoto himself took on the task of cleaning up the spiritual backlash and catastrophe, accepting the job with grace. Not even a hundred thousand Soul Burials could phase him.

Sometimes, Shunsui wondered if Yamamoto had felt guilty on some level. But that was all in the past, and times changed. Mortals continued to build their weapons, and it was eventually decided that Soul Reapers would come to loiter in the launch systems. They were there at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis; they were there when Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Union chose to avert nuclear winter.

The Soul Reapers were always there, really.

===

The new conference wasn’t yet underway when Shunsui arrived, having passed through the veil and jogged across an ocean in a bit less than five minutes.

Shunsui’s intended seat would have been somewhere in-between Lord Hao and the Disciples, but several decades ago, he and Yamamoto had graciously decided to go sit somewhere else, surrounded by people who hated them slightly less. Now he made his way to a different table at the east end of the room, and sat down next to his old friend. They made quite the pair — her in impeccably formal blue menswear, and him in the single pinkest, most flowery women’s kimono he could find in the closet.

Much to their irritation, there was a betting pool on “when” they would get together and/or cause an international romance scandal.

“Kyouraku,” Arthur said, shortly and politely. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Yo,” Shunsui said, pretending that the entire situation wasn’t going to give him a coronary. Like him, she hadn’t come with a second or a guest of any kind. “How’s the missus?”

“Mmm. She couldn’t make it.” Her eyes darted around the room. “You know how these things are.”

“Of course,” Shunsui muttered, sinking into his chair.

“And yours?”

“The Captain-Commander can’t make it either. There was, ah… too much paperwork.”

“I was asking about your ‘missus’, not your second.”

“Juushiro is not my missus, thank you very much. He is my _boyfriend_. Completely different.”

“Of course,” Arthur said. “Whatever was I thinking?”

Souls continued to stream in, delegates and attendees arriving early or fashionably late, then finding ever-more impressive ways to sit down and project an air of cultured disinterest.

When everyone who would show up had shown up — and all of the no-shows failed to arrive, as expected — the meeting finally began in earnest. The delegate from Jianghu stood up and said excitedly:

“Barragan is finally dead!”

The pronouncement was met with quite a few cheers from all corners of the room.

“Thank God, it’s about time!”

“-fucking hax-!”

“Aw, I was hoping I’d be the one to kill him.”

“-well, yeah, his death throes were hardly subtle-”

“Fucker stole his crown from me, I’d _better_ get it back-”

“And good riddance, too!”

Padmavati coughed lightly, sitting on a lotus throne. “Don’t tell me _you_ killed him.”

“Well…” The Jianghu delegate shrugged noncommittally. “I sensed it, and I thought it was important enough to call for a meeting? He died in mortal Japan.”

Padmavati turned to look at Shunsui. All eyes were suddenly focused on Shunsui, in fact; he took a deep breath to calm down.

“Okay,” Shunsui said. “This probably sounds kind of bad, but we’ve been a bit too busy to give status updates on our local upheavals.”

“Too busy or too proud and secretive?” Lord Hao asked, his eyes glinting.

“Busy,” Shunsui said shortly. “One of our captains, Sosuke Aizen, turned out to be a rogue traitor agent — we _totally_ don’t condone his actions, just to be clear — and it took us years to find him out because he had an illusion-type Soul Cutter.”

Paracelsus raised a hand. “We’re sure we properly sealed Descartes, right?”

“No, Aizen was not Descartes!” Shunsui said. “He was _way_ hotter — anyways. He killed our Central 46, so we had to take over-”

“Hah! I knew you had it in you!” Helgi yelled. “Congratulations on _finally_ declaring martial law!”

Shunsui began to knead his temples.

“-we took over, while our rogue Captain ran off to Hueco Mundo and set up shop. He raised an army of Hollows to assault us, including Barragan, then he attacked us. And we killed his Hollows, including Barragan. Any questions?”

Silence.

“You’re saying that you had a Captain powerful enough to command Barragan?” Arthur asked incredulously. “And you _lost him?”_

“Well…” Shunsui trailed off. “Let’s just say that I don’t think our traitor turned on us because of anything _we_ did. He was just a megalomaniac.”

“You’re also saying that you had enough firepower to kill Barragan anyways,” Arthur said. “Barragan, the Hollow who ate Xolotl, Supay, and Hunahpú for breakfast? _That_ Barragan?”

“Yes?”

“And you obviously haven’t lost your entire standing army, or else you wouldn’t be here and candid with us. How did you do it?”

 _Um_. “That’s classified, sorry. One of our Kido experts did him in.”

“You’ve also had a magus who could kill Barragan this entire time?”

“Well, no, he was kind of. Exiled, until now.”

“So you had _two_ men who could kill Barragan, and you lost them _both!?_ ”

“Don’t look at me like that, Arthur, it was the previous administration! And… actually, I suppose it was Aizen’s fault that Hachigen got kicked out.”

Lord Hao laughed deeply. “Typical Japanese incompetence.”

 _This is it_ , Shunsui thought. _I’ve gotta get out of here._

“What exactly was this Aizen trying to do, then?” Ezra asked.

“Like I said, he was a megalomaniac. He was trying to become God.”

Silence fell for the second time.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said. “You’re telling me that this man actually _wanted_ to be God? The _Lynchpin?_ ”

“Well, yeah.” Shunsui shrugged.

“This man wanted to be God, and his best idea was to do it by _violence?_ ” Padmavati asked, as if Shunsui had just pissed in her soup.

“I think that’s a great idea!” Helgi and Lord Hao said simultaneously, before glaring at each other and breaking out into a staring contest.

Sitting at Ezra’s table, a dark-robed woman with an almost heart-shaped mask — the first and only Arrancar in the room — leaned over to her companion, and murmured: “I suppose Aizen couldn’t possibly have done a worse job than the God we have already.”

Her companion, a vaguely unkempt man in a prayer shawl, visibly struggled to hold back laughter. Naturally, Ezra shot the two of them a particularly pointed, very offended look.

“Forget Aizen and God,” said the delegate from Jianghu. No-one remembered his name. For that matter, had he even ever told anyone his name? Why was no-one bothered by that? Well, it was probably unimportant. “Barragan’s gone, bitches! Hueco Mundo is finally free real estate again! This is the cleanup job we’ve been waiting for for centuries!”

There was a long pause, as everyone in the room looked around. They all experienced the same slow, creeping realization that no-one really had _any_ claim to Hueco Mundo, and that for all of the incredible Hollow treasures it probably had, it was also a hot potato of responsibility. All of the American souls currently getting devoured by Hollows would actually have to be given proper Soul Burials and send-offs, and that was going to have to be _someone’s_ responsibility.

“I think Hueco Mundo should go to the Seireitei,” Ezra said. “They did kill Barragan, after all.”

“Fuck off, Ezra,” said the man in the prayer shawl. “It’s _your fault_ that Hueco Mundo happened to begin with.”

“My fault?” Ezra spluttered. “Do I look like colonial Spain to you?”

“I don’t know about that,” said the other man. “But colonial Spain looks a lot like you, doesn’t it?”

“What-? You think that just because they were carting around crosses, you can blame it on us!? Heaven is non-denominational!”

“Oh, of course. That’s why Heaven is coterminous with the _fucking Vatican._ ”

Shunsui sighed. “Just to be clear, we’re not taking Hueco Mundo. Certainly not _all of it_. We couldn’t hold that much territory.”

“ _We_ could hold that territory,” Helgi said smugly, and everyone ignored him.

“What do the actual Americans in the room think?” Shunsui asked calmly. “Seeing as they’re closest to Hueco Mundo, and all.”

There were two American afterlives, really, although only one of them had a stamp of collective approval. There was the American National Afterlife, the American civil religion taken to its limit when the founding fathers of America decided that they weren’t going to go to any _British_ afterlife when they died. George Washington himself was in the room, with a very complicated look on his face.

Then there was Hell. Not the awful kind of Hell, where people on the Naughty List are sent to be tortured and burned for all of eternity in a vaguely metaphorical way. The fun Hell, populated by heretics, hippies, and punks, where you could listen to death metal for all of eternity, or hold raves and gay cuddle puddles, or go on a very literal acid trip. Or…

Well, they didn’t have a coherent image of themselves, but that was okay. Every nation had people living and dying in a paradigm far removed from conventional regional and religious afterlives; worlds apart, in spiritual terms. And then there would be somewhere to catch them, like Hell, Jianghu, or R'lyeh; or there would be nowhere to go, and they would turn into Hollows.

“We can’t take responsibility for all of Hueco Mundo,” Washington said gruffly. “Although Mexico and Central America would be within our capacity.”

“Hah!” Lucifer said, and wiped a feather off of her jacket. It smeared away, oozy and seamless. “You wouldn’t be any better than Barragan.”

“Barragan was a Hollow, and _we_ are Soul Reapers.”

“Barragan was an imperialist, little bitch conquistador who got unlucky in life and then got lucky in death. Same difference.”

“I’m sorry-? Just who do you think you are?”

Lucifer looked down, exaggerating the motion for effect. “Huh, does it not say my name on my nametag?”

“No, actually,” Washington said sharply. Indeed, Lucifer’s nametag read: _Suck My Dick._

“Girls, you’re both pretty.”

The two of them paused in their argument, and looked down to where a green-haired little girl was sitting on the ground.

“Who-?” Washington asked. “How did you get in?”

“Fifty bucks says the little girl is actually 500 years old,” said Lucifer.

“I got in through the front door,” said the little girl, and Shunsui knew:

_This day is actually, literally going to be the death of me. Again._

“Also, I’m only…” the girl held out her fingers, counting off as if to check something. “Three hundred… twenty three? How do ya count age when you’re a composite soul…? It… overlaps, right? Or, no…”

“Nelliel,” Shunsui said, barely keeping his frustration down. “What are you doing here?”

“What do ya think?” Nelliel said shortly, before her lip started wobbling. “We just got Hueco Mundo back and you wanna take it away again?”

“I-It’s not like that!” Washington said. He pulled back and away from the terror weapon sitting in front of him — the puppy-dog eyes and distraught expression, the eyes shedding absolute crocodile tears.

“It is like that!” said Nelliel.

“It totally is,” said Lucifer. “They’re trying to colonize you guys again, now that big bad Hollow King Barragan is gone.”

Arthur lightly elbowed Shunsui. “Do you know this girl?”

“She’s…” Shunsui trailed off. “She used to be one of Aizen’s Arrancar? I’m not sure where she’s coming from now. Things got complicated towards the end.”

“Please tell me Aizen’s Hollows weren’t all little girls.”

Shunsui thought back. “Well, no, Nelliel was the only one. Except for Starrk.”

“Who?”

“Oh, he was Aizen’s most powerful Hollow. Not like me or Barragan, with overwrought tricks; more like Yamamoto or you, with the overwhelming strength and firepower.”

“And he was a little girl?”

“Well, he split his soul in two, and one of them was a little girl. We were trying to kill each other; it didn’t seem like the right time to ask. You know?”

“Unfortunately? Yes." 

On the ground floor, Nelliel was engaged in pitched argument with several of the adults around her, meeting their flaring spiritual pressures head-on. Everyone was a little on edge with a Higher Hollow in the room, but no-one wanted to be the first one to attack, especially if she wasn’t attacking. After the third argument in their long history that escalated into a pitched battle, forced mortals to redraw maps, and didn’t even settle any disagreements or kill anyone important, it was decided: the first person to outright attack was _always_ the one who would have to pay to clean up the inevitable collateral damage.

“We want Hueco Mundo,” Nelliel yelled petulantly. “It’s _ours!_ Barragan was happy ruling over a… a wasteland, but we aren’t!”

“Oh, and who is ‘we’ exactly?” Ezra scoffed.

“Me, and Starrk and Lily, and… Tia Harribel… Halibel? Can’t pronounce… Tia and her Beasts! And Cirruci and Nemo, and… Uryuu!”

Well, at least now Shunsui knew where all of the remains of the Arrancar had gone. _‘Dead’ my ass_.

“More Hollows,” Ezra said dismissively.

“Uryuu isn’t a Hollow! He’s a Quincy! And a really good tailor, too!” Nelliel fingered the hem of her dress.

“Oh, a Quincy too?” Lord Hao laughed. “A soulkiller? As if we needed any more reason to crush you lot.”

The man in the prayer shawl rolled his eyes. “We’re all big boys and girls, Hao; you can cut the balance-of-souls propaganda.”

“Hah!” Lord Hao spat. “That hardly makes the Quincies any better, and you of all people should know that!”

“Yes, I’m all but _professionally obligated_ to have strong reservations about the moschiah’s soul-sucking dynasty, but that doesn’t mean I want to kill them all.”

“Dumbass, you _always_ kill them all. Otherwise the sole survivor rises up and deposes you.”

Meanwhile, Nelliel was stomping her foot against the ground and arguing with Ezra again. “-I don’t care what you want us to be, we can be what you want us to be, but we’re gonna be us! Not you or anyone else!”

“You’re proposing we let you run Hueco Mundo as your own afterlife,” Ezra said, his voice thick with disbelief. “An afterlife run by Hollows? No.”

Nelliel pouted, and pointed at the Arrancar with the heart-shaped mask. “You’ve got a Hollow in here already!”

“There were special circumstances,” Ezra said, and someone scoffed.

“-special circumstances? They aren't the only ones to die-off, but you don’t see anyone else airing their dirty laundry. Fucking Jewish nepotism-”

“THERE WERE SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES,” Ezra reiterated. “And Hollows don’t run Jerusalem, they only serve.”

“Are you kidding me?” Nelliel asked. “Look at Elisha and his gal-pal over there!”

The man in the prayer shawl and the Arrancar sat up straight in their seats, decidedly _not_ looking at each other.

“They’ve been making bedroom eyes at each other for half of this meeting! If you think she doesn’t have him wrapped around her little finger, you’re crazy!”

“You can’t even _see_ my eyes,” muttered the nameless Arrancar, running her fingers over her mask as if to confirm that it still didn’t have any eyeholes.

“I’m a Hollow,” Nelliel said. “We know.”

Ezra’s eyes were already open, but somehow he opened them again, exposing a screamingly-bright and scouring light. “Enough! This is ridiculous!”

Nelliel shut her eyes tight and blew a raspberry at the man.

Arthur leaned forward on her elbows. “I think it’s a perfectly fine idea, actually. I’ll put my support in with the girl.”

“As will I,” Sariputta said.

“Yes, well, you’re always the mavericks,” Ezra said. “How are _Hollows_ supposed perform Soul Burials?”

Shunsui coughed. “You _do_ know we’ve been doing Soul Burials with our Soul Cutters, right? Do you remember what those are made of?”

“We’re Arrancars,” Nelliel said, piping up as soon as Shunsui was done. “We have Soul Cutters too!”

“You’re less than a dozen Arrancars,” Ezra said.

“Ya, well, it’s a lot easier to convince Hollows to become Arrancar when there’s a King who actually cares about protecting his people from free-for-all cannibalism!”

“Don’t make me laugh! Your average Hollow is too broken to want to become human again.”

“Guh!” Nelliel looked on the verge of throwing a tantrum. “You’re such a jerk! ‘Wah, you’re all irredeemably broken, we’re going to fix you by stabbing you!’”

“We don’t use Soul Cutters to perform Soul Burials.”

“It’s the same difference! You don’t think anything of us, do you?” Nelliel wildly gesticulated. “You don’t reincarnate your souls but you, you would rather Bury us and… replace us, us with the people we were before we ever Hollowed!”

“That’s not fair,” Ezra said.

“Well, neither are you! So there!”

People screamed, and shouted, and whined. About everything, really. Things only got worse when Lillynette barged in, asking for her friend Nelliel, followed shortly after by Starrk, asking for another shot of Nelliel’s healing slime, and the two halves of the First Espada found Lord Hao trying to kill Nelliel for an insult to his dignity.

Then Uryuu arrived, looking for Starrk, and discovered not only that the Soul Reapers were still trying to solve their problems with genocide, but also that the new uniforms he had made for the Espada had been destroyed, and-

===

Juushiro was fully healed by the time that Shunsui returned.

“How did it go?” Juushiro asked. “Yamamoto’s been asking for you.”

Shunsui considered this, dead and wobbly on his feet, dressed in his utterly tattered and burned pink kimono.

“I think it went well,” Shunsui said.


End file.
